This paper investigates the long-term impact of early childhood malnutrition, in children living in a
rural area of Tanzania, on their subsequent educational achievements as young adults. The data used
are of an exclusive long term panel data set collected in the Kagera Health and Development Survey.
Infants born in the early Nineties were traced and interviewed in 2004. To perform the main objective
of the work, any attrition due to household or environmental characteristics is removed by
differencing among siblings. Additionally, a broad investigation on the weather conditions that
prevailed during infancy is conducted, in order to attain the instruments to face the existing
endogeneity proper of the health variable.
Estimation results show that malnutrition and poor health experienced during early life have long term
effects on the child’s human capital growth. Specifically, improving the Tanzanian child’s health
status would result in an additional 28% probability of completing primary education. This result
emerges when the two districts of Kagera - where the refugees escaped from the genocides of Burundi
and Rwanda in the early Nineties - are excluded from the analysis.